Boffins crack encryption challenge

A global team of scientists from eight organisations has solved the latest RSA-576 factoring challenge in a little more than three months using around 100 workstations.

Sharing a $10,000 cash prize from RSA Security are the Scientific Computing Institute, the Pure Mathematics Institute in Germany, the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in The Netherlands, and several other organisations.

RSA-576 is a smaller-scale example of the types of cryptographic keys that are recommended to secure internet and wireless transactions.

Typical keys are at least 1,024 bits, while RSA-576 is 576 bits. Larger numbers are considered to provide significantly greater security.

"The information received during these challenges is a valuable resource to the cryptographic community and can be helpful for organisations in choosing appropriate cryptographic measures for a desired level of security," said Burt Kaliski, chief scientist and director at RSA Laboratories.

"RSA Security extends our congratulations to the team for their efforts."

Originally started by RSA Laboratories in 1991, the Factoring Challenge encryption 'puzzle' was established to encourage research into computational number theory and the practical difficulty of factoring large integers.

To solve the factoring challenge, the consortium combined resources from around the world, including hardware from the Experimental Mathematics Institute in Essen, the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnologie, and experts from the Number Field Sieve network of mathematicians throughout Canada, the US and the UK.

The RSA Security Challenge Numbers can be found here.